Talk:Artists

The subject of this article has
an entry in the Editor's Handbook.

For background information and
guides on maintaining this article,
see Artists.

Hero Power

Artists' wiki pages say 'Hero power' not 'Hero Power', even though Hearthstone and this page uses the latter version. Do we care? -- Karol007 (talk) 23:05, 27 June 2015 (UTC)

It should be 'Hero Powers'. However, the section headers were created before this got corrected, and so use the simpler version. Re: caring, it's *very* low priority. But hey, I was here, so I fixed all the pages listed on Artist. -- Taohinton (talk) 23:01, 29 June 2015 (UTC)

Unofficial artist credit

As now mentioned at the start of the article, when adding attribution for artists that isn't directly sourced from the game itself (ie stated in the Collection itself, or at least via a reliable database site) please add a reference of some kind. This doesn't need to be much; just <ref>www.artistshomepage.com</ref> or <ref>www.gallerysite.com/gallerypage1.htm</ref> will do. Adding that source to the individual card page will serve as a reference for questions over who created the work. You don't need to add the reference to every related page, just the card page (in the case of art that has no page of its own, such as promotional art, please add a reference on the artist page). [Edited, 2016-11-17.]

It should only take a few extra seconds to do this each time, but it will help immeasurably when trying to ascertain the correct artist. When artist credit is added without any reference or source, there is no way to be sure if the attribution is correct, accidentally mistaken, or even simply vandalism. For another editor to check over, hunt down and finally reference every one of the hundreds of attributed cards themselves would take an immense amount of time, while for the editor adding the attribution it only takes a moment to copy and paste the URL before pressing save. Without sources attributions may be removed, or worse lead to false information not only on this wiki, but potentially spreading to other sites, too. Please take the time to do this. -- Taohinton (talk) 18:45, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

New system

I've just finished implementing a new system for artists that I've been working on for some time. The new system is almost entirely automated, and is designed to reduce the amount of editor input necessary, thus saving a lot of time and effort while producing more consistent and up to date listings.

The system works by using {{setartist}} on individual card pages. This template sets a property which is searched for on artist pages by {{List cards/Artist}}. This template in turn automatically displays all cards credited to the artist on each artist page, and creates a range of properties counting how many cards of each type the artist is credited for. This page then uses a series of special templates to create custom tables displaying counts based on those properties.

The consequence of all this is that the user only needs to enter the artist in one place: the card page. The card is then automatically displayed on the artist page, and added to the count/s on this page. This is a massive improvement to the previous system, which required the same data entering in three places for each card (the card page, artist page, and this page). Because of a lack of editors willing (perhaps understandably) to put in this triplicate effort, both this page and individual artist pages were out of date, with many cards missing. As of the switch over more than 200 cards which were missing from this page have been brought back into the system, including dozens of cards that were also missing from individual artist pages. In the future all card pages will be created with {{setartist}} in place, with the default value of 'Unknown', which can be used to help track down cards with no known artist, as well as test for errors in the system.

There are two downsides to the new system. Firstly, properties are only reset when pages are re-cached. As a result, the tables here may lag slightly behind current counts. However, this shouldn't matter much outside of the release of new expansions/adventures, and can be easily fixed by resaving the artist pages in question. Secondly, reproducing the previous design, with the name of each card listed for each artist, appears to be beyond the capabilities of the wiki at this time (at least as far as loading speed and sustainability are concerned). As a result, we now have a simple numerical breakdown, which is definitely far poorer. However, we may be able to improve this in the future, and I'm open to input.

Overall, the benefits of far reduced workload and far more comprehensive and up to date listings should be well worth it going forward. -- Taohinton (talk) 04:04, 17 November 2016 (UTC)